We walked out to the parking lot without saying a word. He wasn’t happy about the missing window in my truck, especially when he sat down on some of the glass I hadn’t quite cleaned up.
I started the truck and pulled out of the parking lot. “Start talking,” I said. “Tell me about Raymond Julius.”
“God, it’s freezing in here,” he said. It was about thirty degrees outside. I’m not sure what the windchill would be if you were riding around at sixty miles an hour in a truck with no passenger side window. The man didn’t even have a coat on.
“Raymond,” I said again, nice and slow. “Julius.”
“What can I tell you? He was kind of weird. He was way into all that militia stuff. Hated the government.”
“So he belonged to a militia?”
“No. He tried, I think. It didn’t work out. He was more into being a detective than being a soldier. Or a patriot or whatever the hell they call themselves.”
“He had guns?”
“Yes,” Prudell said. “The man had guns. He didn’t have permits for them, but he had guns.”
“Did he have a nine-millimeter pistol?”
“Don’t know for sure,” he said. “I wouldn’t be surprised.”
“Would he know how to get his hands on a silencer?”
“I’m sure he would,” he said. “Why are you asking me all this?”
“Which way are we going?” I said. “Three Mile Road? You said the west side of town. Be more specific.”
“Hell, I don’t know,” he said. “I remember getting off there, I think. I had to pick him up one day when his car broke down.”
“Old junker? No muffler?”
“Yeah, I think so.”
I took the exit and headed west. “Now where?”
“I told you, I don’t remember.” He peered out at the road, running his fingers through his hair. “I think it was up by the industrial park.”
“How did he start working for you?”
“I had a listing in the Yellow Pages. He called me up, wanted to know if he could work for me. I told him no, he kept calling me up again and again. Every day. Said he’d do anything, run errands, take phone calls. Said he wanted to be a private detective so bad, he’d start out working for free.”
“What, he expected to work his way up to investigator?”
“That’s how he saw it. I explained to him how it worked. You gotta be certified by the state, you gotta get a gun permit. That really set him off. Like I said, that man hated the government so much. Far as he was concerned, the state of Michigan was the only thing preventing him from being an investigator.”
“And you let this guy work for you?”
“The man was begging me. Said it was a matter of life or death to him. So I figured, hell, I’ll take him with me one day, just make him get me lunch, cover me while I went to the bathroom. I was just watching lifeguards, writing down their routine. I figured he would see how boring it was and forget all about it.”
“That was the place out on Drummond Island.”
“Yeah,” he said. “I watched those lifeguards for three days straight, wrote out a detailed report. I tried to do a good job for Uttley. I guess it wasn’t good enough, huh?”
I looked over at him. He was looking out the window into the cold night. The wind was whipping his crazy red hair in every direction.
“Julius is dead,” I said.
He didn’t say anything. He just kept looking out the window.
“Did you hear me? He’s dead.”
“I thought so,” he said. He looked at me for a second, and then looked at the dashboard. “The way you were talking about him.”
“He was stalking me for months,” I said. “He killed three men, including Edwin Fulton. He tried to kill me, too.”
Prudell just nodded.
“Doesn’t surprise you?”
He shrugged his shoulders. “I wouldn’t have expected something like that from him, but… hell, who knows anymore. I remember, he’d get this look in his eyes sometimes. Made me wonder why I ever let him hang around me.”
“I killed him,” I said.
He turned and looked at me. He didn’t say anything.
“I had no choice,” I said.
He just nodded his head.
I came to Fourteenth Street. “Do I turn here?”
“I think so,” he said. “I think I came this way. I remember having to look around for his street.”
We came to a stop sign. I could keep going north on Fourteenth Street or turn east on Eighth Avenue. “Which way?”
“I’m thinking,” he said. We just sat there in the truck. One single street lamp burned above us. It sounded eerily quiet without the rush of wind through the open window. “Go straight,” he finally said. “I think it’s up this way.”
We passed small brick houses built close together, most of them at least fifty years old. This was one of the original neighborhoods in the Soo, back when there was an Air Force base just across the highway, long before the casinos and the tourists. We went up Fourteenth Street, past Seventh and Sixth, and then we ran into a dead end. “I remember now,” he said. “I came to this dead end and had to turn around. Go back down to Sixth Street.”
I did as he said. I was getting disoriented in this maze of numbered streets. It wasn’t like in New York City, where all the numbers make some kind of sense, and where the streets run one way and the avenues run another way. “All right, now go to Thirteenth Street and take that all the way up until it ends.” We passed Fifth Street and then the road ended at Fourth. “Let’s try a left,” he said.
“It feels like we’re going in circles,” I said.
“Feel free to take over the navigation,” he said.
As we worked our way west on Fourth Street, the houses got smaller and smaller. Most of them had every window and door covered with plastic. With the bay and all its violent weather less than a mile away, I couldn’t see how some of these places were still standing.
“This is starting to look familiar,” he said. As we rounded a bend, a sign told us that were now on Oak Street. “Yes, that’s right,” he said. “I remember the tree names. There’ll be some more tree streets around here. I’m pretty sure his house is on one of them.”
We worked our way through Ash Street, and then onto Walnut and then Chestnut. Prudell kept staring out of the open window and then looking back across at my side of the street. “I know we’re close,” he said. “I know it’s in this neighborhood.”
“We’ve been down every street,” I said. The man was being more cooperative than I could have hoped, but even so my patience was starting to fray around the edges.
“No, we haven’t,” he said. “As soon as we see his house, I know I’ll recognize it. It had this awful siding on it. I can picture it in my mind. It looked like a mangy dog, that siding. All this hairy stuff on it like it was shedding. That house was such a dump. He was renting it. I remember him complaining about the landlord, all the stuff that was broken. The pipes used to freeze every night in the winter, he said. The way he talked about that landlord, I swear. All the things he said he would do to him if he ever got the chance.”
“He never tried anything?”
“I don’t think so. I think he was afraid to even talk to him.”
I thought about that while he looked down the street. It was a dark corner in an unknown neighborhood. The Soo is a friendly place in general, but you never knew who’s going to take exception to a strange truck cruising back and forth in front of the house. I was sure there were a lot of guns around here, high-powered deer rifles with scopes, shotguns.
“How about we keep moving?” I said.
“Wait a minute, now that I think of it, there was a street that I missed the first time through here. I didn’t even see it until I doubled back. I think it was another tree name.”
I turned the truck around and headed back up Chestnut. We took the right onto Ash, and went all the way down the street to Walnut. “This time, keep going straight,” he said.